Game of Thrones Rewatch 4.5: "First of His Name"

Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.
 

4.5 “First of His Name”

Written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss

Directed by Michelle McLaren

There are four major pieces in this episode and several smaller bits. I don’t know if you all have noticed, but right about the beginning of season four, the titles of the episodes completely stopped being indications of the theme of the episode, and the episodes have mostly stopped having unifying themes. At this point (and it gets worse in seasons five and six), Benioff and Weiss are hitting major plot points without bothering to try to explore the unifying themes behind those plot points or characterization or anything else.

The bit that gives the episode its title is Tommen’s crowning as he’s named king of Westeros. He and Margaery have developed a (creepy) rapport that Cersei notices, so she goes to feel out Margaery. As becomes typical in the show for these last three seasons, their interaction is catty and mean, just barely veiled behind innocuous-seeming comments (they get less innocuous later). In this case, Margaery implies that Cersei is old by asking whether she should call her sister or mother once she marries Tommen and Cersei marries Loras. The show clearly wants us to root for Margaery over Cersei, but this Mean Girls thing they’ve got going with Margaery makes me not like her very much. It gets worse later.

There’s a little bit of detail added in that helps explain some of Tywin’s motivation: he needs Cersei and Jaime to behave and put the family first because the mines at Casterly Rock have run dry. The Lannisters no longer have access to the kind of wealth they did before, and Tywin needs the alliance with the Tyrells to keep the Lannisters in power and flush. Too bad the only Lannister who might be able to manage that has been framed for murder and is reviled for no really good reason except being disabled (and sometimes kind of an ass).

Speaking of keeping power, Daenerys hears about Joffrey’s death, the overthrow of the council she left to rule Astapor, and Yunkai’s return to slavery and has to make a choice. Daario has captured the Meereenese navy, which affords enough ships to take her entire army back to Westeros right now. But she doesn’t yet have the confidence in her own ability to rule necessary to take that step. She knows she can conquer, but she doesn’t know if she can hold a city together, let alone seven kingdoms. So she decides to stay and learn instead of leaving for Westeros right away, which has every one of her advisors slapping their foreheads and groaning, probably. Now, on the one hand, learning to be a competent leader is important. Being queen of seven kingdoms isn’t a learn-as-you-go job. On the other hand, emphasizes her imperialist attitude—conquering and ruling Slavers Bay becomes practice for the “real thing” when she takes Westeros. It reduces the importance of the human lives she’s saved from slavery and the ones she’s ruling now. At any time, she could drop everything and just leave. This is something I’ve said about the books, too, and I don’t think it’s a problem with the way the story is being told, but a commentary on imperialism and colonialism. Where the show trips up a bit, I think, is in leaving out Dany’s comment that “her children” (the former slaves) need time to recover from being slaves and grow into themselves as people, and her dragons need time to grow up before they’re fearsome enough to help her take Westeros. The show makes it all about her and her abilities and self-doubt, which is again a paring-down of the many factors that go into every decision Dany makes and creates a severe oversimplification of her character and circumstances.

Petyr and Sansa reach the Vale, where Sansa finally feels safe for a few minutes; Lysa greets her warmly, Robin’s actually on his best (if a bit tactless) behavior, and she’s far, far away from King’s Landing. Also, she saw the Eyrie’s defenses and there’s no way anyone (without a dragon) is going to get in here to take her back to the Lannisters. When Lysa and Petyr are alone, Lysa insists on getting married right now—she even has a Septon waiting outside. She says they had their wedding night years ago, and Petyr makes a face like he doesn’t understand what she’s talking about.

Here’s the thing: the entire plot was set in motion by Petyr yearning after Catelyn for years. He set Lannister against Stark to punish Ned for marrying Catelyn. He manipulated Lysa into killing Jon Arryn and sending Cat the letter that started the whole thing in motion. He believes that he had sex with Catelyn when they were young. The show never really disabuses us of that notion, whereas the books make it clear that Catelyn went to her marriage to Ned a virgin. This is supposed to be the aha moment that shows that when Petyr had sex with “Cat,” he was really sleeping with Lysa. That the show dropped the ball so hard on this moment takes away a lot of the impact of the whole subplot—Petyr’s entire reason for doing what he did was a lie! This was all for no reason. Also, without Cat’s interactions with her father, we don’t find out why Lysa’s so disturbed—she got pregnant when she slept with Petyr and Hoster forced her to abort, then married her off to Jon Arryn, who was like forty years older than her. This sequence ticks a couple of boxes on the plot progression chart, but it misses some serious nuance and emotional depth and ultimately Lysa just looks like a crazy person and not as damaged as she actually is.

Later Lysa pins Sansa down and demands to know exactly what her relationship with Petyr is; she suspects that Petyr’s only taking care of Sansa because she’s Cat’s daughter, and Lysa has always suspected that Petyr loved Cat more than her. Her demands escalate from fairly mild-toned asking to insisting and finally to a manic fever pitch as she asks whether Sansa’s pregnant with Petyr’s baby or if she knows whether Petyr had sex with his prostitutes. It rightly freaks Sansa right out, and all semblance of safety is gone. Then Lysa says she intends Sansa to marry Robin and be lady of the Vale, and poor Sansa feels herself once again being reduced to a marriageable object instead of being cared for because she’s a human being.

The fourth major piece is Craster’s Keep. Locke does some scouting and spots Bran, who of course is his primary target, so when he goes back, he tells the rest of them to avoid that particular outbuilding, claiming it’s holding some nasty dogs. Karl storms out to threaten Meera one more time, because we can’t finish this subplot without making sure one of the women is threatened with rape or raped. He’s distracted by the fighting outside and leaves; after some chaos, he runs into Jon, who kills him with the help of one of Craster’s women. Rast gets mauled to death by Ghost, and then Craster’s women set the keep on fire and prepare to hike back to Castle Black with Jon.

In the middle of all this, Bran once again wargs into Hodor in order to get free of Locke, who’s trying to kidnap him. This time it gets worse; Bran not only uses Hodor for his brute strength, but forces him to kill Locke. When Bran leaves Hodor, Hodor looks down at his hands and sees the blood and starts to freak out. So not only has Bran mentally violated Hodor yet again, he’s further traumatized him by forcing him to do something entirely outside of his character—kill a man with his bare hands. Then Bran doesn’t even a) notice Hodor’s distress or b) give him a minute to recover; he immediately starts yelling for Hodor to come untie him, then free Jojen and Meera. Bran then faces his last chance to turn back; he sees Jon and has to decide whether to call out to him and let Jon take him back to Castle Black or hide and continue his mission. He decides to continue heading north.

There’s a few small character moments that keep us clued in to the progress of the characters who are traveling or otherwise don’t have a lot to do in this episode. Arya and Sandor are still headed for the Eyrie. Sandor hears Arya saying her “prayers” and says hate’s as good a thing as any to give someone a reason to keep living. Then he finds out he’s on her list and his face is equal parts hilarious and really sad. Later, he catches her practicing her water dancing and yells at her about it being a completely useless way to fight and maybe if Syrio had armor and a real sword like a real warrior, he wouldn’t have died.

Pod turns out to be the worst squire possible; he can barely ride a horse, he can’t cook over a fire (he doesn’t even skin the rabbit first), and outside of the Blackwater, he’s never actually learned to fight. But he’s loyal to a fault and refuses to leave her even when she releases him from his vows. After they talk for a bit, she relents just a tad and allows him to help her with her armor.

Finally, Cersei and Oberyn have a moment wherein she tries to manipulate him (without sex!!!!) or at least kind of feel out where he is about Tyrion by bonding over their kids. She says that they’re in similar positions; he couldn’t save his sister or her kids, just as she couldn’t save Joffrey. She also asks how Myrcella is doing and he assures her she’s fine, happy, and enjoying herself in Dorne, because unlike the rest of Westeros, they don’t hurt little girls in Dorne. Cersei says they hurt little girls everywhere, and for one of the last times, I feel truly bad for her. This society hurts everyone, but women and girls get the worst of it, even highborn ones.

RIP:

Locke

Karl

Rast

Next week: The Iron Bank considers Stannis’ request. Yara tries to rescue Theon. Hizdahr smarms in. Tyrion goes to trial.

All images from screencapped.net

Game of Thrones Rewatch 4.4: "Oathkeeper"

Read the previous entry in this series here.
Read the next entry in this series here.
 

4.4 “Oathkeeper”

Written by Bryan Cogman

Directed by Michelle McLaren

Commentary by Michelle McLaren and Robb McLachlan (DP)

There’s a lot going on in this episode exploring how women rule or otherwise wield power, and not a bit of it isn’t somehow disturbing. There’s a tendency in this show to skim over the politics (which, for a show called Game of Thrones that’s ostensibly supposed to be all about the politics is kinda irritating) and boil everything down to archetype, stereotype, and otherwise lowest common denominator, and that’s especially evident in the way the show treats women. And I’m not just talking about the rape; the way women are written is just awful. The only ways women can obtain and maintain power are through sex and violence, and the show is really schizophrenic about whether it condones this behavior or not.

Daenerys, her army having convinced the slaves of Meereen to rebel and overthrow their masters, passes judgment on those masters by taking an eye-for-an-eye approach: she has 168 of them nailed up (alive) along the streets of the city, each pointing to the next as they did the slave children along the road to Meereen. Barristan tries to talk her out of it; after all, this is the kind of thing he saw while serving Aerys. Dany says something about answering injustice with justice, and Barristan clearly isn’t convinced. Now, while this incident did happen in the books, the context is vastly different, mostly because of how watered-down the politics are in the show. Daenerys is constantly trying to balance diplomacy with her sense of justice, and there are far more people vying for her attention and loyalty in the books than in the show. She also constantly second-guesses herself and has to struggle to make decisions; the show has her making snap decisions that are almost always violent ones. Late in A Storm of Swords she realizes that conquering is not the same as ruling and she’s been acting “more khal than queen” and needs to completely change her approach (Ch. 71, Daenerys VI). The show loses most of that balancing act, roughly three-quarters of the people who need things from her, and several advisors, along with adding several violent incidents that either don’t happen in the books or occur in an entirely different context.

In King’s Landing, Cersei’s freezing out Jaime. Now, this could be the emotional fallout I was talking about last week, but it could also be Jaime’s refusal to murder Tyrion for her. Graves said that the reason Cersei ultimately capitulated to having sex with Jaime was to try to manipulate him into killing Tyrion. That’s gross on a whole other level from the whole “accidental rape” thing, but also didn’t come across in the scene. Cersei totally uses sex as a weapon, but amazingly enough that got toned way down for the show, probably partially because, except for Lancel, all the guys she manipulated through sex were dropped—the Kettleblacks are nowhere to be seen, for example. So when it comes to sexual manipulation, so far Cersei’s been all talk. That means there’s no precedent for her actually using sex to manipulate Jaime, and the link between “kill Tyrion” and “okay fine let’s have sex” is nonexistent in that scene. Which means that the reason for the freezing-out is really unclear.

Meanwhile, Olenna is giving Margaery lessons in sexual manipulation. She admits to having done it herself back in her heyday, breaking up her sister’s relationship with Luthor by “accidentally” seducing him the night before he was to propose to Viola. She advises Margaery to do something similar to the very young Tommen. Tommen’s age is a whole other issue on its own; in the books, he starts out at seven and starts ruling at nine. They aged up most of the kids by about 2-3 years for the show, which still makes him nine in season one, and maybe 12 by the time he takes the throne. Obviously Dean-Charles Chapman is older than twelve, so maybe we could see fourteen, but not much older than fifteen if they want to keep the continuity they set up with ages in season one (that’s a big if). Margaery in the books is roughly sixteen when she marries Renly, which puts her at around seventeen when she marries Tommen. Her age isn’t established in the show, but Natalie Dormer is in her mid-thirties, and Margaery is probably meant to be in her mid-twenties.

The upshot of all of this is that Margaery seducing Tommen is super gross. Having already established that Tyrion won’t have sex with a fourteen-year-old girl because she’s a child, to then gleefully send Margaery out to use her wiles on Tommen without any discussion of the age difference is also super gross. And considering that when Margaery sneaks into Tommen’s bedroom to start the bonding process he clearly has no idea what sex even is, it all smacks of pedophilic grooming. Sure, it’s hard to believe that Margaery wouldn’t consummate the marriage if Tommen’s technically old enough, but they could have avoided the whole problem by not aging Tommen up as far as they apparently did and having Margaery manipulate him the way she did in the books—with kittens and assertions that as king, he has power that Cersei’s keeping away from him.

Not to mention that Olenna’s whole story undermines her as a deft political mind and turns her into someone who ultimately got where she is by using sexual manipulation—just like Cersei, who we’re not supposed to like for that exact reason. So, pick one, show. Is sexual manipulation smart, or bad, or does it depend on who’s doing it and how open they are about it? Because it seems like Cersei’s only mistake was saying out loud that tears and a vagina are a woman’s best weapons.

And then after all of this “sex gives women power” bullcrap, we get Craster’s Keep, where rape is just background noise to the actual action that’s happening in the scene. Karl has apparently taken a page from the Over-the-Top Villain Handbook™ and is drinking from Mormont’s skull and encouraging his men to “fuck [the women] til they’re dead.” Classy. He also plans to keep Craster’s deal with the White Walkers going once the women explain to him what it is, and has Rast take a newborn baby out into the woods.

This is how Bran finds Craster’s Keep; they hear the baby crying and go to investigate, then get themselves all captured, which of course means that Meera has to be threatened with rape, because that’s what happens in this show (and how you know the Bad Guys are Bad Guys except when they’re Good Guys with Tortured Pasts). It doesn’t take much of this treatment for Bran to up and tell Karl exactly who they are, and of course Karl immediately links him with Jon. My question about all of this has been—how in the world do people like Craster and Karl know all about Jon’s family? Mance, sure, he was a member of the Night’s Watch and snuck south of the Wall on at least one occasion. But who would tell Craster about the Stark family? When would anyone talk to Karl about Jon’s little half-brother (or cousin, considering his true parentage)? I’m not saying it’s 100% unbelievable that they’d know these things, but I’d love to see how they know them besides Plot Convenience.

Also appearing in this episode:

Everyone likes Jon more than Alliser and Alliser is Super Threatened by him, so he says sure, go kill the mutineers with way more volunteers than I thought you’d actually get, whoops. But also with Locke, who the Boltons sent up to get rid of Bran (priority one) and Jon (priority two).

Jaime sends Brienne out after Sansa and Arya with his Valyrian steel sword, a set of black enameled armor, and Pod. She names the sword Oathkeeper and they exchange looks, then she leaves. Which makes me wonder what they’re trying to do with this relationship. Obviously they love each other (whether that’s romantic or not isn’t relevant), but are they seriously trying to back Jaime’s development back up to the man he was becoming out in the Riverlands—you know, before he raped his sister? Are we supposed to be “shipping” this? Because no, sorry, I don’t ship Brienne with anyone with the kind of entitlement issues that would lead him to rape his sister. The narrative eye of the show clearly wants us to sympathize with Jaime, though, and this is also part of what I meant by emotional fallout. Jaime might not see what he did as wrong, but the overall narrative also doesn’t, and that’s a problem. If the writers claim that it’s rape, then they treat rape very lightly in this show (that’s pretty much been demonstrated) and that’s a bigger problem.

Jaime also visits Tyrion and they bond over not killing/having killed family members.

Petyr’s taking Sansa to the Eyrie and continuing to stand far too close to her and look at her in a way that makes me shudder. Sansa’s starting to get an eye for politics, which is great. Too bad they yoink that out from under her later.

The baby mentioned earlier gets scooped up by a White Walker, hauled way up north, stuck on an altar thing, and then poked on the cheek by the Night King, which apparently turns him into a baby White Walker. I have so many questions.

RIP:

Some Great Masters (only one on screen; the nailed-up ones aren’t dead yet)

Next week: Tommen becomes king. Pod is the worst squire. Lysa is the worst aunt. Bran’s mind-rape escalates.

Kalamazoo 2017: Updates

With a sneak preview of the schedule for the 2017 International Congress on Medieval Studies up (here), I'm happy to note that our panel, Growing up Medieval: The Middle Ages in Children's and Young Adult Literature, is Session 190, scheduled for Friday, 12 May 2017, at 10am in Schneider 1225. I'll be presiding, and I hope y'all'll all join us. We've got three excellent papers on deck for you.

Also, I need to see about scheduling the Annual General Meeting for the Society, per §5.1 of the Society Constitution (here). Since our session precedes lunch time, conducting the meeting immediately after the panel--and in the same room, which appears not to be hosting a lunchtime function--seems sensible enough. But I would welcome input on the matter; members, please leave comments below in support of the idea or with suggestions for alternate times/locations.

This post will be copied to the Society website. Notice of it is being emailed across the Society email list.

Game of Thrones Rewatch 4.3: "Breaker of Chains"

Read the previous entry in this series here.
Read the next entry in this series here.
 

4.3 “Breaker of Chains”

Written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss

Directed by Alex Graves

This is a complicated episode, and not just in the fallout from the Purple Wedding. A lot of stuff happened (or didn’t happen) outside the episode, in post-episode interviews and criticism, and even on the DVD. So I’ll save the scene that caused all the kerfluffle for last. (Something to look forward to.)

The episode starts immediately after the last episode cut, with Cersei yelling for Tyrion’s arrest and demanding to know where “his wife” is. Tywin orders the capital locked down while Dontos and Sansa are running for it; they make it to a rowboat and head out to sea. Hours later (night has fallen and fog is rolling over the sea), they reach a ship, and (surprise!) it’s Petyr’s. Dontos having served his narrative purpose, Petyr has him killed, then explains to Sansa why he’s her only hope while standing uncomfortably close to her for a forty-something-year-old man talking to a fourteen-year-old girl. He explains the whole plot to her, which might actually have been easy to miss, considering how hard it is to spot the missing jewel on the necklace even when you’re looking for it. Also, I think the amethyst hairnet might have made more sense, because the jewels on the necklace are glass, so did they hide the poison inside them? Does that mean Olenna had to smash the jewel to get it out?

Olenna discusses what happened with Margaery, establishing that Margaery had nothing to do with it and her freaking out at the wedding was genuine. I kind of love the mentor relationship they’ve established here, with Olenna teaching Margaery to play the game of thrones and assuring her that she’s doing fine. Tommen should be easier to manipulate than Joffrey, she’s told. (Easier and way creepier.)

Arya and Sandor are still traveling, which gives the writers a chance to actually pay attention to the smallfolk for a minute and show what’s happening to them given all the wars and raiding and other chaos going on in the Riverlands. I guess some of this is better than none of this. When they shifted Brienne’s and Jaime’s respective storylines, we lost a lot of “look what war does to those who aren’t playing your stupid game of thrones.”

Further north, Jon is the Only Smart Person at the Wall™ and everyone else is Just Stubborn and Doesn’t Like Jon Snow’s Ideas™®. Jon says they need to go take care of the mutineers at Craster’s Keep in case Mance stops there and asks them about the defense of the Wall, a number that Jon wildly inflated. This whole plan doesn’t really make any sense to me, as what’s most likely to happen if Mance’s army comes upon the mutineers is they’ll just kill them all; and if they try to question them, the mutineers will tell them to fuck off and then they’ll kill them all; and if they torture them, they won’t be able to trust the information they get and they’ll kill them all. So, basically, Jon’s plan throws good money after bad and risks men they could be using to defend the Wall when Mance does get here. And considering that Olly’s village got attacked and they know that not only the group Jon crossed with but now also a whole bunch of Faux-Thenns are south of the Wall, they’re going to need every man they can get.

Oh, right, this episode also introduces us to Olly, who is a terrible character and should never have been introduced in the first place. I’ll definitely be telling you why in more detail as we get to know him better (as much as you can know a one-dimensional character).

Meanwhile, Sam is trying to protect Gilly from the men of the Watch by taking her to Mole’s Town, where the men of the Watch go to get their freak on, because that makes sense. Gilly’s super angry about this whole plan but goes along with it anyway because she loves Sam even when she doesn’t like him very much.

Davos is trying to put together an army for Stannis to go defend the Wall, and it’s not going well. Stannis is mad because Joffrey’s dead and he’s not in a position to take advantage of it. But he doesn’t want to hire sellswords because he’s Stubborn and Honorable (or something). The discussion makes Davos late for his reading lesson, and we get a super cute moment between Davos and Shireen ("you need to learn to read so you don't keep saying ka-niggit" "that was one time") during which Davos has an epiphany and asks Shireen for her help with a letter to the Iron Bank of Braavos.

Dany reaches Meereen, where the champion of the city rides out and challenges her; after some debate about who’s the most expendable, she sends Daario out to fight him. (I miss Strong Belwas.) Daario does some grandstanding and then kills the Meereenese champion’s horse with a thrown knife, then the champion when he skids to a halt at Daario’s feet. Dany then somehow magically projects her voice across several hundred yards of open space and up to the top of the city walls to tell the slaves that she’s here to help them be free, then pelts everyone with broken slave collars to prove that she’s already freed the slaves of Yunkai and Astapor. The slaves start to get ideas.

That leaves us with one of the more controversial scenes in the show to date, though it’s been overshadowed by what happens to Sansa next season. While Tommen is visiting his brother’s body, Tywin explains to him why Joffrey failed at being king and promises to teach him how to be a better one, then essentially takes him away from Cersei and leaves. Jaime passes them on his way in and kicks everyone out so he can have a private moment with Cersei and their son’s body. Cersei wants Jaime to kill Tyrion, which Jaime absolutely does not want to do, and she cries and kisses him, but then pulls away from his golden hand when he touches her with it.

This is where everything goes completely wrong.

Jaime grabs Cersei by the hair, yanks her head back, and kisses her again. She pushes him away and says “not here,” but he tears her underskirt while pulling at it. She says “not here” and “stop it”; he says “no” and pushes her to the floor. She says “it’s not right” and keeps saying “it’s not right” as Jaime penetrates her; he says “I don’t care” a couple of times and the scene cuts.

As it’s shot and presented, this is pretty unequivocally rape. Not everyone on the production team saw it that way. In the “Inside the Episode” featurette, Benioff refers to it as rape. Alex Graves, on the other hand, went on an interview tour saying it was not rape, that he hadn’t shot it as rape, that it “becomes consensual by the end,” and that there are clues in the scene that it wasn’t rape—Cersei kissing Jaime, wrapping her legs around him, and gripping the altar cloth. Unfortunately, the editing loses her wrapping her legs around him, the altar-cloth grip is ambiguous, and even though she does kiss him, she keeps saying no. Benioff and Weiss said nothing more about it—actively refusing interview requests regarding the scene—until nearly a year later, when asked about it in an open Q&A forum. Weiss sits there with a deer-in-the-headlights look while Benioff stumbles over himself admitting that it’s a disturbing scene and blaming viewers for thinking that Jaime was somehow in a redemptive arc that would make him incapable of acts like this. He reminds the audience member that in the first episode, he throws Bran out a window, as if protecting his secret relationship with his sister from a nosy kid he doesn’t even know and raping his sister are in any way equivalent acts.

So there’s a lot of problems here. A major one is, of course, that this scene utterly fails to faithfully adapt the antecedent scene from the books, wherein Cersei initially resists, but then verbally encourages Jaime and helps him open his pants and find his way into her. Martin’s response to the controversy was to wish that they’d kept his dialogue, as that would have made it a lot clearer that the scene was consensual and Cersei’s initial reluctance was due to the venue, not the sex itself. With the shift in timeline, Jaime’s been in King’s Landing for several weeks rather than a few hours, and Cersei’s been rebuffing his advances that whole time, which completely changes the tone of this encounter.

Secondly, Alex Graves has said that he didn’t read that scene in the books because he wasn’t shooting the book scene, he was shooting the scene Benioff and Weiss wrote for him. And apparently there wasn’t a lot of discussion about what they intended from it, since Benioff has said at least twice that it was rape and Graves did the interview gamut saying it wasn’t. So communication clearly broke down there. Benioff and Weiss’ utter refusal to deal with the issue is also a major problem; they left Graves out on his own without clarifying for a year, and there wasn’t even a commentary track on the DVD—this is the only episode on the DVD without a commentary track.

Third, while Benioff may yammer about Jaime being a “grey character” and not easily fitted into “D&D morality”—lawful good, chaotic evil, etc.—he does still have a character arc and character development, and this walks it back a great deal. Do real humans have difficulty making and keeping progress with their own personalities and lives and character quirks? Sure. Jaime is not a real person. Jaime is a character, and one of the things about good writing is that characters have arcs. Characters develop. And even if losing some of that development is necessary to the plot, Jaime (book-Jaime, anyway) is not a rapist. All this does is reinforce the toxic masculinity they’ve set up in the show wherein every woman is constantly at risk from every man, that given the opportunity to rape or sexually assault, no man will be able to resist (except Tyrion because he is perfect, apparently. We’ll get there). This is super problematic.

Finally, this never comes up again. If Benioff and Weiss intended it to be rape, there should be repercussions. There should be some sort of fallout—unless they think rape isn’t that big of a deal. Or that raping Cersei in particular, given what an awful person she is, isn’t that big of a deal. If it wasn’t supposed to be rape, then sure, it makes sense that nobody ever says anything, that Cersei and Jaime’s relationship doesn’t suffer, that everything goes on as normal. But the only person saying it wasn’t supposed to be rape was Graves. Even Nickolaj Coster-Waldeau and Lena Headey have given (uncomfortable) interviews talking about it as a rape scene. Graves isn’t in charge of the rest of the season; Benioff and Weiss are. And for them to ignore the emotional fallout of something like being raped by your own brother on the floor next to your dead son is just . . . bad.

RIP:

Dontos Hollard

Olly’s father and various other villagers

Meereen’s champion (and his horse)

Next week: Dany takes Meereen. Jaime visits Tyrion. Petyr continues to be a creeper. Margaery starts being a creeper. Brienne goes on a journey.